Kyle Thomas Hemingway: The ephemera edit

“Kiki’s never sure if she’ll perform, until she does. Sometimes she’s not in the mood, says she’s too drunk. It’s different now that people come here to watch her, now that she stands in front instead of among them. They clang their cutlery and chant her name until she takes her place in the light and starts her slow-motion dance, no distance to lend her mystery, no stage to make her majestic, everyone sharing the same heat and smelling the same sweat.”

“As the Queen’s grandmother Queen Mary once said to a relative, ‘You are a member of the British royal family. We are never tired and we all love hospitals.’”

“But nothing lasts forever, even silence.”

“Is there anyone in the civilized world whose eyes do not light up and face does not smile when he hears the word champagne?”

“It is always assumed that Venice is the ideal place for a honeymoon. This is a grave error. To live in Venice or even to visit it means that you fall in love with the city itself. There is nothing left over in your heart for anyone else.”

“Let’s see, what else? Don’t go into debt over clothes. Hug your dogs while you have them. Know that you can skip most anything. You will fall in love eventually. Remember that. Also, the things you like aren’t weird. Don’t worry about being normal. It’s an awful thing to aspire to.”

“I found myself taking more risks, because failure had a second life—it could spin a yarn. There was an agency in the retelling, in the self-deprecation and of course self-mythologizing. Memoir is how you groom yourself. Memoir is drag.”

“For better or worse, there are few things so disarming as one who laughs well at her own expense.”

“I only wanted absolute quiet to think out why I had developed a sad attitude toward sadness, a melancholy attitude toward melancholy and a tragic attitude toward tragedy—why I had become identified with the objects of my horror or compassion.”

“There is considerable hypocrisy in conventionalism. Any thinking person is aware of this paradox; but in dealing with conventional people it is advantageous to treat them as though they were not hypocrites. It isn’t a question of faithfulness to your own concepts; it is a matter of compromise so that you can remain an individual without the constant threat of conventional pressures.”